”Thirty years ago, I was invited to write my very first review for the TLS. One thing at least I got right, when I wrote: ‘Marguerite Duras is a writer whose next move only the foolhardy would predict’. And this is just as well, since what I entirely omitted to note was that the wonderful work under review, L’Amant, which signalled Duras’s return to narrative after more than a decade of work in film, had in it the potential to take a moderately well-known writer, admired by a loyal cult of followers, and turn her into an international literary superstar.”